I’ve never been much of a cook, but it’s something I’d love to try and get better at. I’ve got a growing family and as much as freezer food is serving them now, when they’re older I’d like to be able to cook them something genuinely nice.
Wraps!
This isn’t a fancy meal, but it’s healthy and fast.
Get a wrap (about 12 inches in diameter), and fill it with whatever you think is healthy. For us, that’s cucumber, tomatoes, avocado, lettuce, black beans, cheese. We’ve also included bacon, chicken, salsa, and rice. Add some seasoning, olive oil, and lemon juice.
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Anything I can make in a crockpot. I can do a pretty mean pot roast.
I make biscuits and homemade gravy from either sausage or bacon grease (whatever I happen to cook up that day).
Anything casserole. Beef stew, Reuben or golumpki. Just dump stuff in a pan or slow cooker.
Now’s a good time to learn then (when they will forget your mistakes.)
Rather than specific dishes, focus on techniques. Learn to make pan sauces and your food immediately goes up several levels. Be generous with herbs and spices (those little pots you get in supermarkets are not supposed to last long). Serve white rice on the side and mix noodles in to the dish (pasta is a kind of noodle). Learn to make stock and bone broths, if you cook a whole chicken you can serve the best cuts as part of the meal, save the rest for a stir-fry or sandwiches and you can use the bones and connective tissue to create a broth that you can freeze for later. Vegetable soups are also great and can use up all sorts of bits and pieces. In cold weather you can put them in a thermos as a hot packed lunch.
If you want to make something sweet, store bought rolls of filo pastry can be quite good these days, add some fruit, fresh or tinned, and cook.
Experiment, most importantly. If you don’t know how to cook with something, find people from where it comes from and see what they are doing with it.
Costco short ribs in the instant pot. With the random Asian spices I have in my pantry. Freezer to table in 50min. The instant pot is my favorite tool.
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Bean burritos.
Store bought tortillas. Canned or crock pot beans. Chopped lettuce and tomatoes. Shredded cheese. Avocado mashed with salt and pepper, and lime when I remember. Sour cream. Salsa for those who want it. Can be enhanced by adding taco meat by browning some ground beef and adding taco seasoning.
This one:
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/keith-youngs-chicken-cacciatore-recipe-1946896
You want to cut the quantities in half, the batch is absolutely huge if you do the recipe as-written. It basically cooks enough chicken cacciatore for an entire team of firemen.
It’s a flexible and forgiving recipe, though. You can play around with it, do substitutions, etc.
1 pot spaghetti “non-carbonara”. Cook 130g spaghetti while whisking an egg with some good pepper and fresh-grated parmeggiano. Drain noodles, keep a little bit of the noodle water in the pot. Noodles back in, egg-cheese goodness on top (no heat, just the hot noodles and warm pot). Mix until everything is creamy. Enjoy.
Lately, I’ve been eating a lot of farro instead of rice, pasta or oatmeal. It has a nice nutty taste and chewy texture that I like.
Mix it up with some veggies like sliced carrots and chickpeas for a complete meal.
https://cookieandkate.com/roasted-carrots-recipe-with-farro-chickpeas/
https://www.thekitchn.com/one-pot-farro-carrots-chickpeas-recipe-23012504
Farro is great. For a side dish I tend to cook it in spiced broth (chicken or beef depending on the main course) instead of water. Another one you might like is kamut.
Want to impress impress at a family gathering with a relatively simple dish?
Potatoes are stupid versatile and easy to get right.
For me, my goto in this area is:
Get a pack of Yukon goldens. You could do baby reds, but don’t get Russets for this. They don’t saute well.
Preheat a saute pan or skillet to medium, cut each potato into a half or a third (bigger ones to a third) and rinse.
Mix potatoes in a bowl with about a tbsp of vegetable oil or butter and liberal seasoning of choice. There’s this parmesan-garlic blend I like, but it’s pretty hard to go wrong on the seasoning because potatoes work with basically anything.
Throw the mixed potatoes into the saute pan, add about 1/4 cup of water and cover. Cook for 10 minutes or until the potatoes are lightly seared and tender. ‘Tender’ means no resistance when stabbed with a fork.
Stir occasionally with a spatula so that they don’t stick to the pan. Add a little water when you uncover to stir, the steam is important.
Put it on a fancy plate and bam. The compliments roll in.
For a meal, add onions (or really any vegetables) and choice of protein. My goto is chicken thighs cooked separately in a cast iron.
Cheap, easy, flavorful, versatile, substantial.
We recently discovered you can do this same prep, and then just roast them in an air fryer, and they’re awesome
Nice. I’ll have to give that a shot
Baked chicken - There are a ton of these recipes but they all come down to basically the same thing: Brine, put seasoning on, cook it in the oven, let it rest a few minutes, done. It takes a little time from start to finish, but the total investment of actual effort is like 5 minutes. (I keep a little tupperware of premixed seasoning.) Combine with a tray of vegetables in the same oven and/or some rice or something. (I actually do this with skin-on chicken thighs instead, but it’s basically the same)
Steak - Learn to cook a good steak, it’s fuckin magic. Again you can find recipes online. Let it warm to room temperature first, put salt and pepper on it, sear the outside 30s or so on high heat including picking it up and hitting the edges, then lower the heat and flip it every 60-90 seconds to let it cook, and at the end dump some garlic and butter in the pan to flavor it. Let it sit a minute or two and you’re good bb.
Blueberry pancakes - Use fresh blueberries.
Fried rice. You make rice to be part of some other dish, then the next day fry the slightly dried out leftover rice in the fridge with soy sauce and an egg and whatever else you have onhand that would go well with it (garlic, onion, cabbage, tomatoes, etc).
The biggest thing with getting better at cooking is to just find a recipe that looks tasty and go for it. Follow the directions and see how it comes out. Try to understand the directions too. Why are we cooking things in X Y Z order? Why are we cooking at this temperature? Etc. You might still mess stuff up, Ive been cooking at home for 10 years and still have meals I just have to trash because theybare unsavable, but try to figure out what went wrong, and then try making that meal again but looking to fix your mistake.
There are also some great cookbooks and resources out there to kickstart your journey of understanding cooking. Salt Fat Acid Heat is a fantastic book that dives into the four pillars of what makes something delicious. It was also adapted into a Netflix series so you can watch that as well. The Food Lab is all about nerdy food science. Kenji Lopez Alt has spent his time figuring out the science behind cooking so you dont have to. Also, a lot of info from the Food Lab is also available on Serious Eats’s website, where Kenji was a writer for a long time.
Also if you have kids, get them involved! Learn with them so they have a jumpstart on being comfortable in the kitchen!
Now to answer your actual question, my go to recipe is pizza. Ive been making it pretty much every week since I was 22. I’ve built up a collection of tools for pizza making, so I have a propane oven that reaches 900°F for neopolitan pizza, a baking steel for regular oven pizzas, pans for south shore bar style pizzas, etc. Its all nice to have but you can make pizza on a cookie sheet or in a cast iron pan. The first pizzas I made were store bought dough in a greased cast iron pan with jarred sauce and some shredded mozz. Nowadays I make my own dough and sauce.
For an easy NY style pizza I use Kenji Lopez Alts same day dough recipe (https://youtu.be/uXkT8LbCPOY), and for the sauce I do
- 1 28oz can whole peeled tomatos (I like Cento, but look for brands that dont use Calcium Chloride or Citric Acid in the ingredients)
- ~2tbsp Olive Oil
- Like 2-3 tsp of kosher salt Blend all that with an immersion blender in the can of tomatos (might have to pour out some of the liquid in the can).
Often times Ill just leave it at that, but you can also add dried oregano, dried basil, a pinch of sugar, or some red chili flakes to spice it up.
